The chair holds an enduring fascination as the ultimate design challenge. Artists, craftspeople, designers, and architects have relentlessly sought the perfect solution: an ideal chair blending ergonomic, aesthetic, and material considerations - all in the hope of enticing us to sit. Never one to shy from challenges, Garry Knox Bennett has for more than 30 years been one of America's most important and influential furniture makers. This full color, 96 page catalogue is a beautiful companion to the exhibition Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker , which debuted at the Bellevue Arts Museum, and featured 52 chairs which exemplify Bennett's boisterous bravado and professed disdain for validated technical and artistic practices. The works in Call Me Chairmaker also reveal the essence of Bennett's artistic personality and his passion for pursuing the many possibilities the chair presents. Inspired by past and present famous architects and designers of chairs, Bennett lets his raucous humor, sly wit, and visual puns dance with full abandonment. His free-spirited, irreverent oeuvre forsakes not only conventional principles of art and design but, even more, the canons of furniture craftsmanship. 
Includes essays by Deputy Head of Research from Victoria and Albert Museum, Glenn Adamson, art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto, and independent art critic and curator Matthew Kangas. Also included is an interview with Garry Knox Bennett conducted by curator Stefano Catalani.

Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker

Arthur C. Danto

Stefano Catalani

Michael Monroe

Glenn Adamson

Matthew Kangas

Garry Knox Bennett

Bellevue Arts Museum

Burning Forest: The Art of Maria Frank Abrams is a crucial addition to the literature of modernism in America and its expression among European exiles such as Maria Frank Abrams (b. 1924) in Seattle during the mid-twentieth century. With a preface by Peter Selz and foreword by Holocaust expert Deborah E. Lipstadt, Matthew Kangas's new monograph deepens our vision of how Pacific Northwest art developed and flourished. In this lavishly illustrated study, art critic Matthew Kangas chronicles Abrams's evolution from adored child artist to Holocaust survivor to second-generation Northwest School artist and late-blooming geometric abstract painter. Drawing intensively upon the artist's interviews and oral histories, as well as family archives and photographs, Kangas makes the case for Abrams as an overlooked transitional figure in Pacific Northwest art: from "mystic" adherent to sophisticated, European-inspired modernist.

Burning Forest: The Art of Maria Frank Abrams

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Book Publishers Network

A unique collection of 42 essays with a broad purview of modern and contemporary art profusely illustrated with black and white photos and color plates. Book consists of five sections: Reconsidering the New York School; Art in Public Places; Art Outside the Center; Canadian Art; and Late Modernism. Kangas takes a special interest in epicenters — cities with art communities outside the New York area. His writing incorporates literary and art-critical theory as applied methods for better understanding and appreciating modern and contemporary art. Epicenter is a must for everyone interested in the relation between New York and the rest of the world, as well as for artists, collectors and other visual arts professionals who seek a broader peespective onto the art of the past half-century.

Epicenter: Essays on North American Art

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Kangas, Matthew

Antiques & Collectibles

Midmarch Arts Press

The Bible of crafts— including ceramics, glass, wood, fiber &amp; metals and the masters in each category. Sets a high standard for scholarship.

Craft & Concept: The Rematerialization of the Art Object

History & Criticism

Preface by Judy Chicago. Hardback 13 1/2 by 11 1/2". 144 pages -130 full color illustrations (52 full color plates, 7 black and white figures and 1 full colored gate-fold), chronology and bibliography.

Camille Patha: Geography of Desire

Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University

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Books by Matthew Kangas